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34-Year-Old Woman Arrested After Posing as 15-Year-Old High School Student For a Year

A Texas woman has been arrested for providing false information to authorities after she posed as a 15-year-old high school student for nearly a year.

Police say 34-year-old Charity Johnson has been posing as 15-year-old Charity Stevens at New Life Christina School for nearly a year.

Last March, Johnson, posing as a 15-year-old, met Tamica Lincoln at her job at McDonalds. Lincoln says Charity told her that her dad had abused her, her parents were now dead, and she had no place to stay.

She brought the “15-year-old girl,” who was actually four years older than her, home and bought her clothes and took care of her, essentially taking on the role of a guardian. She helped Charity enroll in school and attended her parent-teacher conferences.

Lincoln says “she acted like a kid. She did her homework. She got good report cards.”

Stuart Newlin, the school’s principal, said “everyone we talked to assumed she was a teenager like she said she was, because she looked like one. She had friends. Everybody liked her.”

Then, one day, Lincoln got a call from a group that helps needy kids after Charity tried to join. When the group ran a background check, they found “more questions than answers.”

Lincoln then called the manager of McDonald’s where they both worked and he told her that her birth year was actually 1979.

Lincoln alerted the authorities and police came to the home. When they asked Charity to identify herself, she used the name Stevens. Police arrested her for providing a false name and fictitious information.

Lincoln says “I just don’t know why she did it. Why put yourself and others at risk to do something like this? I have deep concerns about her being who we don’t know who she is, and then she’s out there at the school.”